10 Reasons Why Louie Is One of the Best Shows on Television

The new season of Louis C.K.’s FX show Louie is premiering tonight. Here, our critic John Powers weighs in on why you shouldn’t miss it.

1. HE’S PERSONAL. Today’s best TV comedies, like the best comedians, offer a personal vision of the world—they’re not content simply to make us laugh. Louis C.K. wants to make us laugh, of course, but takes care to anchor his comedy in his own life, whether he’s selling tickets to his live shows on his website or using Louie to examine his own experiences of dating, raising his kids, or being in show business. Like Lena Dunham with Girls, his comedy is human scale, not industrial. It comes from him and nobody else.

2. HE PREFERS REVEALING MOMENTS TO ARTIFICIAL PLOTS. What makes sitcoms unbearable is that they squeeze everything into the same “well-made” half-hour format with its predictably timed wisecracks and creaky storylines designed to pay off at the end. Avoiding such formalistic fakery, C.K. builds Louie around scenes and perceptions that rub up against one another. He knows you don’t need a whole storyline to capture a complex truth about parenting and childhood. You can do it as elegantly as this:

3. HE KNOWS WHAT STAND-UP CAN’T DO. C.K. is our reigning stand-up king, but he grasps that there are important things you just can’t say. Some ideas and feelings have to be caught on the wing. Louie’s last season ended—brilliantly—with Louie suddenly taking leave of his life in New York for New Year’s and flying to China, where he wound up eating with a family. This was an episode about leaving your comfort zone, confronting what’s alien, and having it expand your world—it was about a leap in consciousness born of unhappiness. And it was the kind of revelation that could only be shown, not spoken.

4. HE’S BECOMING CONFIDENT AS AN ACTOR. Having spent so long perfecting their stand-up personae, comedians generally take a while to feel comfortable playing a character. This is certainly true of C.K., who’s clearly better now than he was during his ill-starred (but not bad) HBO series, Lucky Louie. He was good as a liar in Blue Jasmine and as a straight man in American Hustle, and even playing a version of himself—never an easy task—he’s increasingly confident at being able to do it. Consider this lovely long scene from last season in which he asks Parker Posey’s bookstore clerk out.

5. HE’S GETTING SMARTER IN SHOWING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN. There’s always been a bit of the “poor me” sad sack about Louie’s dealings with women (as you just saw in that asking-for-a-date scene). But as the show has progressed, Louie’s romantic and sexual life has grown more interesting and, um, grown-up. In the two-part, “Daddy’s Girlfriend,” his date with Posey’s Liz starts with nervousness, moves to giddiness as she expands his world, and by the end grows dark, sad, and emotionally challenging. Liz goes from being Louie’s fantasy into a living, breathing woman that he’s not quite sure how to handle. In less than an hour, these two episodes of Louie outstrip every Hollywood romantic comedy made this century.

6. HE CAPTURES THE EMOTIONAL TEXTURE OF THE COMEDY LIFE. There have been lots of shows about being in show business—the most revelatory was The Larry Sanders Show—but C.K. does better than anyone at capturing a comedian’s life in its insecurities, rivalries, weird alienations, vaulting ambitions (could his character, Louie, replace David Letterman?), and transformations of hard experience into stand-up. Louie gives you everything from Dane Cook trying to convince Louie that he didn’t steal his jokes to Joan Rivers telling a disaffected Louie to suck it up because performing is a privilege.

7. HE’S BECOMING A REAL DIRECTOR. Steeped in the look of ’70s movies, Louie was visually striking from the beginning, and over the years, C.K. has shown an increasing command of imagery, staging, and performance. If his directing doesn’t yet rival the work of the greatest comedians, from Buster Keaton to Albert Brooks, it’s still the most beautiful-looking comedy on TV. It’s not afraid to use images, as in this scene when Louie looks back on what it took to get his daughter her present.

8. HE’S OBSCENE—BUT TO A PURPOSE. It’s part of C.K.’s image that he’s an everyman with an everyman’s appetites and vulgarities. Which may be another way of saying that he sometimes works a bit too blue. But unlike most comedians, he doesn’t go blue simply because he knows it will get easy laughs. The sharpest example is his encounter with Melissa Leo in season three, which is, quite simply, the most shockingly filthy scene I’ve ever seen on TV. And yet it’s not meaninglessly filthy. You can see it here, but be forewarned: It is breathtakingly obscene.

9. HE PUSHES US TOWARD SANITY AND HUMANITY. The reason that C.K. is our best comedian right now is that his humor shows what’s crazy and spoiled in our own behavior—it has a moral dimension. You can see this in one of his most famous bits, an appearance on Conan that rings so true it’s hilarious.